I caught the second half of Christiane Amanpour's two-hour special "Scream Bloody Murder" tonight. In it Ms. Amanpour details several recent genocides, including Saddam Hussein's chemical attacks on Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s, the Serbian-administered concentration camps in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, the massacre of 800,000 by machete in Rwanda in 1994, and Darfur today. She also interviews several heroes who, during these various bloodbaths, "scream[ed] bloody murder" to get the attention of powerful people who might intervene. These include Richard Holbrooke in Bosnia and James Galbraith in Iraq.
Though I haven't yet watched it in its entirety, it's clear this piece of journalism is of superb quality and immense public worth. (It is unimaginable that the the fraudulent hacks at MSNBC and Fox News would ever air anything as valuable as this. They are content to disgrace journalism with their snarky partisanship.) On the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Americans should learn more about the international legal framework that protects human dignity and legally obligates the US to intervene in cases of its severe breech. This month is also the sixtieth anniversary of the drafting of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which the US in shameful belatedness ratified only in 1986. Even so, having assimilated the convention into American law, our government has thus required itself to prevent and/or punish genocide. (Therefore Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush should have been impeached for not addressing incidents in, respectively, Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur.)
Susan Sontag, who went to Bosnia in 1993 to bear witness to the unfolding siege and genocide, said in a 1995 interview with Charlie Rose, "'Never again' is true in that the Jews will never again be killed by the Nazis in the 1940s." She was tragically correct that the rallying cry born of the Holocaust has been rendered hollow by inaction. But building public awareness, like CNN did tonight with its unimpeachable report, is essential to preventing future genocides. This is what Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate and human rights campaigner who survived Hitler's extermination camps, was getting at when he said, "Is memory the only answer to the Tragedy itself? But whatever the answer, memory is its most indispensable element."
1 comment:
It is an absolute disgrace that the United States takes part in treaties or pacts when it has absolutely no interest in adhering by them. Yes, military action in Darfur would (then and now) likely be unpopular with the bulk of American people. How are we to call ourselves a "moral" country if we allow this to happen? How then can the GOP be considered the party of values? The only thing worse than genocide is knowing there is genocide being carried out, in the present, and doing nothing about it. I have a hunch why we have chosen to ignore these mass murders both as a government and as a people- and I think everyone else does too.
And may I point out a gross contradiction in our culture; when a little girl goes missing, or if a woman is killed by her husband, or if a judge is slain, our news networks cover nothing but that story for weeks - towns shut down, candlelight vigils are had, and search parties are formed. This is for one person, one life. If Sudan would get the media coverage of say, Laci Peterson or JonBenet Ramsay it would have been over a long time ago.
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